Mohammed Haydar Zammar

Mohammed Haydar Zammar (1961-) was a Syria-born German jihadist and member of the al-Qaeda Hamburg cell and later an Islamic State member. He was responsible for recruiting several 9/11 hijackers, and he was one of the radical Islamists that attended the al-Quds Mosque in Hamburg, Germany in the 1990s.

Biography
Mohammed Haydar Zammar was born in 1961 in Aleppo, Aleppo Governorate, Syria to a Sunni Muslim Arab family. He moved to Germany with his family at the age of ten, and he was extremely devoted to his religion, impressing even his devout family members. While in high school, he became an associate of al-Qaeda member Mamoun Darkazanli, and he attended mosques in Hamburg. Zammar hoped to work for Mercedes-Benz after graduating from a metalworking college, and he worked as a translator in Saudi Arabia and a truck driver back in Hamburg. However, in 1991 he decided to make jihad his only profession, and he was trained with weapons and explosives in Afghanistan at Osama bin Laden's training camps, and in 1995 he traveled to Bosnia and Herzegovina to join the Bosnian Mujahideen in the fight against Serbia during the Bosnian War. He witnessed atrocities there, and in 1996 he became a formal member of al-Qaeda. When he returned to Hamburg, he was a celebrity, and he gave enthusiastic speeches to fellow al-Quds Mosque attendees, including the relation of stories about Bosnia to them.

In 1998, he befriended Mohamed Atta, and he also frequently met with Mounir el-Motassadeq. Zammar personally recruited several radical Islamists into the Hamburg cell of al-Qaeda, and German police began to tap his phone due to suspicions about his involvement with terrorist activities. In 2000, he met with Said Bahaji frequently, and he collected welfare in both Germany and at his residence in Boston, United States. On 27 October 2001, he travelled to Morocco, where he was arrested in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, which Atta and his other associates Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi perpetrated. He was handed over to Syria, which tortured him and gave information from him to the Americans; America did not have to torture him to get information out of him. In September 2013, Ahrar ash-Sham secured his release in a prisoner exchange during the Syrian Civil War, and he joined the Islamic State. Zammar was one of the negotiators of Ansar Beit al-Maqdis' junction with ISIS, and he raised funds for the group.